


cruelty keeps me even

by choirboyharem



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Twincest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 05:18:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20501525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choirboyharem/pseuds/choirboyharem
Summary: Jerome’s brother has a very strange, insatiable need to consume people. Jerome loves his brother, so he helps to fulfill that need.[Indefinite hiatus.]





	1. euphoria follows puke

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to my dear mari for enabling me and talking about cannibalism with me so much. couldn't have done it without you, babe. 
> 
> the titles are all from giving bad people good ideas by death grips.

Jeremiah is not what anyone would call a ‘sociable person’. He doesn’t like people. He doesn’t like interacting with them, he doesn’t like talking to them, he doesn’t like seeing or being seen by them. He thinks the human race is generally vile, stupid, untrustworthy, and degenerative. 

That’s what makes his hunger so fascinating. The fact that he loathes human beings but can’t get enough of their components is very funny to Jerome. 

Jeremiah eats normal food when he has to, just to stay alive, but it’s like a vampire trying to eat a salad. It tastes worse than dirt to him. The most he can enjoy is rarer-than-rare meat, steak that oozes and bleeds. He becomes ravenous. He’ll get that frightening, glorious look in his eyes, shining and dark and consumed with his compulsion. Something that can’t be fucked out of him. 

He’ll sob, licking and biting Jerome’s skin, sinking his teeth in a little too deep, sucking and lapping up blood where it spills. “Please,” he’ll gasp, looking up at Jerome with an aching desperation, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Please, find someone. Anyone. I’m so hungry, Jerome, _please.” _

And, of course, Jerome will. Because he loves Jeremiah very, very much. 

Jerome will find good food for his brother. Maybe Jeremiah isn’t good with people, but Jerome is. He can read them. He can find their hearts and pin them on their sleeves for them. He knows the_ flavors_ of people that Jeremiah likes and he can sniff them out, play with them, make them want him, play a likable character to whoever he has in his grasp, and bring them home for his brother to ravage. 

Jeremiah likes anyone with a purer blood. No druggies, no alcoholics, no one terminal, no one sick, no one with an altered, detrimental state of being. Just a healthy specimen of a human person, any human person. 

He likes boys better, though. Younger boys, usually college-aged, older teenagers, with big, shining eyes and a giggly overconfidence warring with nervousness because they're definitely still too young to be in a bar, but they slipped in somehow and they just need someone to buy them a drink. They’re all the same. And Jerome can easily take them under his wing, flirt with them, make them think that they matter and they’re worthy of attraction or desire, get them a little drunk, and then bring them home to Jeremiah. 

And they taste sweet. They have a sweetness to them that Jeremiah insists is different. They’re fresher and cleaner and sweeter and they taste more delicate and divine. Jeremiah will moan around the blood on his fingers, dipping his hand into a cracked and gaping ribcage to drink what it holds inside. He’ll take the heart and hold it like it’s something precious, something worth cleaning up and preserving before he sinks his teeth into it and it explodes around his face. The innards, the crushed chambers and wells of blood, flood into Jeremiah’s mouth and what doesn’t go in coats and soaks the front of Jeremiah’s face, covering his cheeks and his nose and his mouth, lips plush and dripping with gore. 

Jerome loves to watch that. It makes him giddy. 

Jeremiah is one of the most hopelessly, frustratingly boring people Jerome has ever known. He refuses to give into his true nature at the best of times and cannot force himself to leave the house, trapping himself in his study ninety percent of the time that he isn’t at work. Repress it all, repress everything, never let yourself feel a single thing because if you do, your soul will corrode and you will collapse and be consumed by guilt and a form of insanity that will corrupt your clearly stable, perfect steel trap of a mind. Because he’s so focused on _that,_ his only real hobbies are creating models that he uses for work and sketching blueprints and his goddamn mazes and doing pencil studies of people or objects or incomprehensible feelings that can’t be depicted in a physical form and if you tell Jeremiah that, he’ll tell you that you don’t get it. He’s maddening. He’s the worst person alive and he makes Jerome sick. 

And, yet, he’s everything Jerome could ever want and more. Whenever Jerome watches Jeremiah tear soft skin off milky bones, chew it and swallow it and then bash in a skull so he can chip it apart and get at the brain, it more than makes up for all of it. He loves to watch Jeremiah feast on gushing, splattering organs, bathing in blood, sweet and heavy as red wine. Picking bones clean. Taking large, rough, carnivorous bites out of flesh, his teeth carving out the horror of what he’s done. 

And then Jerome will kiss him, because even if Jerome doesn’t have a strong taste for human flesh himself, he loves the aftertaste of it. The bits of meat and the overwhelming, sickening, dizzying smell and taste of blood clinging to Jeremiah. He’ll lick it from his brother’s mouth and Jeremiah will kiss him back furiously, panting into Jerome’s mouth and grinding against him, so hard and in need of release that he’s close to tears. 

And, in their purest, truest, most glorious fashion, they’ll splash around in the puddle oozing from the mauled, mangled, lacking corpse on the floor next to them and make violent love to each other. Or they just fuck. It’s not romantic and Jerome shouldn’t act like it is, even though he really, really wants to believe it is. 

Maybe it is. It’s the closest they’ll ever get to romance. When Jeremiah is sticky with guts and tragedy, he looks at Jerome with adoration, delirious and raw and open. When Jerome is inside him, making Jeremiah’s lanky back arch off the floor, Jeremiah looks like he’s never been more in love, his fingernails scratching lines stained with deep red over Jerome’s back. It makes up for all the affection they never got to have when they were children, with Jeremiah crying and running to their mother after Jerome’s play was a little bit too rough, nicking Jeremiah with the tip of a kitchen knife or pulling his hair or leaving dead birds on his pillow. 

After it’s all over, they’ll clean together, clearing away all the evidence of the slaughter in the living room and stuffing the remains in a trash bag that can be thrown into a landfill in the dead of night. They’ll shower together and Jeremiah, satisfied for another week, will act as though he hadn’t been begging for his brother to fuck him. The moment he regains his composure, Jeremiah is his own façade again, isolating himself inside the awful little prison he calls a body.


	2. it doesn't sound so bad when i say it in my mind

The hunger began when they were going through puberty at its worst. Somewhere in between their twelfth and thirteenth birthdays. Jeremiah had confessed it late at night while they were laying in bed together, curled up underneath the covers on Jeremiah's side of the bedroom. Even if they constantly fought over stealing blankets and cold feet and who snored or who talked in their sleep and who was taking up too much on their side, sleeping in their own individual beds wasn't an option and it never had been. They were getting too big for it, longer, more uncoordinated limbs tangling together, growing taller and taking up more space. It was before they'd pushed their beds together. 

"I can't stop," Jeremiah murmured. "W-whenever—whenever I tell Mom I'm at the library, I'm buying something to eat instead. I walk to the grocery store and I buy something with blood in it and I just eat it with my bare hands. I just pull the meat apart and eat it like that. And I still don't get full."

"That's disgusting," Jerome giggled, positively enthralled. "That's so gross! You're a _freak._ Why, though? I've never felt that way. I've always wanted to, like. . . hurt people, y'know, in really, really good ways, play with knives and stuff like that, but I don't wanna eat raw meat; that's just weird."

"But I don't want to! I don't want to eat any of it, that's what I_ mean,_ that's what I'm talking about. It doesn't fill me up. It doesn't feel right after I eat it. I want something better." Jeremiah swallowed and reached out, placing his hand on Jerome's neck. His fingers brushed over it, his breath shaking. "S-something alive. Something with a heartbeat. I want it to be—I want it whole. And warm."

Jerome stared at the anguish and desire so clearly written across Jeremiah's face in wonder, feeling a hot, excited little flutter in his stomach. "Like a person?"

Jeremiah nodded, his lower lip trembling. "Like a person," he whispered, threading his fingers through Jerome's hair. 

"Like me?" 

Jeremiah was silent, but he looked firmly at Jerome's mouth instead of his eyes. 

The first person who had to die to cure Jeremiah of his aches and pains was a girl who had a crush on Jeremiah for some bizarre, inexplicable reason that Jerome, to this day, has never understood. Firstly, she was barking up entirely the wrong tree, and secondly, Jeremiah was not crush-worthy. In middle school, Jeremiah had looked like Noah Webster himself had flagged him down to get a picture of him to insert as the definition of a nerd while the very first dictionary in the English language was in the works. Him in his sweater-vests and his taped-up glasses with his gangly limbs and groomed hair, unable to talk to people in public without stuttering, contemptful and superior, carrying around his well-worn sketchbook everywhere he went. He was friendless and miserable and socially inept and mean and an obvious target for bullying, mostly by Jerome's friends.

Nevertheless, the pretty, quiet, pencil-necked blonde with a ponytail who sat next to Jeremiah in Geometry seemed to like him. A lot. 

"I could bring her to the park," Jeremiah said quietly on the night they began planning it. "We'll tell Mom we're spending the night at our uncle's. I'll give Ecco a note."

Jerome snickered. "Fuck you, that's not her name. Anything to try and stand out if everything else about you is _boring_, I guess." 

"It's short for something; I don't know. And I don't care. That's not the point. She'll do anything I need her to." Jeremiah uncapped a pen and flipped to a fresh page in his sketchbook. 

Jerome grinned and sat up on the bed, watching Jeremiah write. "Are you gonna tell her to come without any underwear on?"

"Shut up," Jeremiah snapped, elbowing him in the chest. Jerome cackled and wrapped his arms around Jeremiah's waist from behind, resting his chin on Jeremiah's shoulder. 

"Dear Ecco," Jerome said in Jeremiah's ear, "I need you to come to the park at midnight for completely normal, good, happy, friendly reasons. Not for sex, though, because unfortunately, you're a girl and I happen to be a massive faggot—"

"I told you to shut up!" Jeremiah threw his sketchbook and pen aside, scrambling out of Jerome's grip to punch him in the mouth instead. Jerome didn't quite duck in time and his jaw snapped to the side, which, well,_ rude,_ so Jerome grabbed a fistful of Jeremiah's hair and pulled as hard as he could. 

"You're so sensitive, Miah," Jerome snarled, catching Jeremiah in the face this time, using an old classic and knocking Jeremiah's glasses off. They hit the floor, twisted and most likely cracked again, a surefire way to upset their mother. Jeremiah made a strangled sound of protest, grabbing Jerome's throat and digging his fingers in, but it lasted all of a second before Jerome punched him hard in the stomach. 

It was another stupid, nonsensical fight that didn't have much of a reason to exist except for the very fact that this sort of thing hadn't happened in a couple of days and if they weren't at war with each other, something was very wrong in that moment. Jeremiah's back hit the mattress first, teeth snapping and wrists making an attempt to twist and jerk out of Jerome's grip. His eyes were bright, his pupils blown up black and wide. 

"I hate you," Jeremiah hissed up at Jerome, trapped and breathing heavily underneath him, feral and twitching. 

He was beautiful. 

Jerome licked his lips, watching his brother's face, lit dimly by the bedside table lamp, golden and soft. The hot, excited flutter in his stomach was back, but it was better, worse, maybe both, maybe neither. 

Without really giving it too much thought, he leaned down and pressed his lips against Jeremiah's, clumsy and unyielding. Jeremiah froze. It seemed like he must have stopped breathing. 

_What are you doing?_ Jerome heard in his head, a voice of honest confusion trying to speak above delightful, awful guilt. _That's your brother. That's your brother underneath you._ He heard it as clear as day, polite but nervous alarms trying to nag at him, telling him, biologically, this wasn't right. It wasn't supposed to feel right. 

Jerome was very good at doing things that people told him he wasn't supposed to do. 

He'd practiced this on girls before, once or twice, while skipping class to go deface private property with a few other people he'd pick from his friend group. The girl he would've picked would've been some giggly, cynical eighth-grader dressed all in black with tall boots who hung on Jerome's every word and he'd purposefully call her by the wrong name to make her feel as average as she was. Jerome had thought it would come in handy later. He'd never really considered that this would be the context, but he was endlessly pleased he had the experience anyway. 

Jeremiah wasn’t struggling anymore. He felt like stability underneath Jerome, comforting and sure and firm. He was warm. And he was soft and pliable, too. Jerome had always wanted to sink his fingers into Jeremiah’s skin as though it were putty and play around in his guts to see if they were the same on the inside as well as the outside. 

Jeremiah made a noise, something like a tiny, breathy moan, his teeth catching Jerome’s bottom lip. It _did something_ to Jerome —something he’d been completely unprepared for. The feeling of it, the sharp little sting that must have cut his lip, seemed to snap down through him and flare with a completely unfamiliar, wonderful, terrifying heat. 

Jerome pulled himself off. Jeremiah stared up at him with darkened, glittering eyes, licking up the smear of blood off his own mouth. 

“I—” Jeremiah’s voice was cracked and broken, one of his freed hands lifting to touch Jerome’s parted mouth. He looked like he was hungry. Like he was starving. Like he hadn’t eaten anything in days. “I-I want—need more.” He swallowed hard, looking at Jerome’s split lip. “Please. Please, do it again, _please.”_

For once in his entire life, Jerome found it difficult to talk. He giggled quietly, feeling sort of delirious, his pants far too tight for comfort. “Wow. Wow, Jesus. You. . . you want me to do that again? You really are just  _ disgusting, _ aren't you?” 

“Please,” Jeremiah begged, clinging desperately to Jerome’s shoulder. “I need it, I need it now, you don’t understand, just do it. Do it already.” His fingernails felt like tiny individual daggers through the fabric. 

There wasn’t anything more delightful and satisfying than Jeremiah pleading and _needing_ Jerome, so Jerome indulged him. He closed the gap between them again and kissed Jeremiah firmly, with purpose rather than curiosity. Jeremiah grabbed a fistful of Jerome’s hair and sank his teeth into Jerome’s lip, pulling hard enough that the pain this time made Jerome tear away with a shriek, far too quickly and far too soon.

Blood ran in fat, thick, heavy drops down Jerome’s chin. He felt a pain that felt like a flashlight being flashed into his eyes. Like sunlight shining on snow. It was bright and blinding as Jerome felt the disturbingly empty gap in his lip, slick and wet and slippery with blood. 

Jeremiah swallowed the chunk of flesh in his mouth.

“Sh-she had better taste like you,” he whispered. 


End file.
